What Makes Document Management Software Different

A word processor is used to create documents, but its ability to organize and manipulate document files is limited. Document management software is explicitly designed to meet the organizational needs of a company or person. It is for people who have hundreds and thousands of documents but but cannot solve problems with folders and simple search engines.

A small business owner might normally keep different software documents in labeled files on a specific hard drive or thumb drive or even in the cloud. Human intelligence can quickly skim through several labels and navigate to a document that they are familiar with. While human intelligence excels at simple organizational problems, some companies have far larger document inventories.

Document management software could be as simple as a library command that retrieves documents from a company database. This is critical to employees who must routinely shift through data. It is also useful for a group project when several documents are being manipulated collaboratively.

Some word processors are programmed to share documents for collaborative development. Any such software has to be optimized for use over a network or over the web. Software must also be able to store this information with minimal management. One objective of document management software is to replace human database keepers.